Telling Time: Sketch of a Phenomenological Chrono-Logy (Athlone Contemporary European Thinkers)

Telling Time Sketch of a Phenomenological Chrono-logy FRANc.;OISE DASTUR translated by Edward Bullard

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Telling Time on the basis of the very intonation of the voice, of the resonance of its Stimmen, which retains within itself against the void of the heavens the obscurity and the withdrawal of the earth.45 It is this agreement which grants that which rises up together with its time, the lightning flash of the Gleich-zeitigkeit, the simultane­ ity, of the ecstasies of time, on the basis of which alone the space of the world opens up.46

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Epilogue Lightning governs all things. 1 (Heraclitus)

Chrono-Iogy interrupts itself at the very moment it makes manifest the lightning flash of the simultaneity that makes it possible since with it, as philosophers2 just as much as poets have said, what we call the beginning is often the end, the end is where we start from.3 In this way, the truth of transcendentalism, at once evasive and founding, of the archeo-teleology of philosophy, resides from the chrono-Iogical point of view in the opening of the space of a possible encounter that itself always takes place in the instan­ taneousness of a 'present' where we are to dwell in improvisation since it is, as Heidegger emphasises, what we are waiting for in coming to our encounter and what we ordinarily call the future.4 This regres­ sive path, this Odyssey of philosophy, whose entire virtue consists in leading us back to where we always already, though improperly, are, has, however, only the circular form of absolute reflection because it ecstatically opens us to the outside of the world; according to the reversibility dear to Merleau-Ponty, for whom 'leaving oneself is returning to oneself and visa versa'.5 And it is this circle, which we rightly call 69

Telling Time 'hermeneutic', that paradoxically makes us capable of welcoming the surprise of the event whose unforesee­ able nature takes off from the ground of our anticipa­ tions, as if through excess. It is doubtless this surprise that is the origin of speech . and the very essence of the voice. Since speech is torn from us in an abduction, it springs up only from us, in spite of ourselves, and ties us to ourselves by taking the immense detour of the world, and the voice is in itself only the phenomenon of the auto-hetero-affection by virtue of which, as Aristotle6 already affirmed, the human soul opens itself to the strangeness of beings and the for-itself welcomes alterity. The voice will therefore always be the name of this element in the human that decentres the human7 and opens it to what it is not. The synchrony through which alone ipseity can be con­ stituted does not come to pass for its own benefit but, on the contrary, to transport us ecstatically to the point where this happens to us and, in happening, literally places us in the world. This is why time is presented to us, in the interrupting experience of the encounter, at one go and like a flash of lightning and why it appears in this way not only, as the poets clearly perceived, in its entirety8 but also in the paradoxical immobility that the philosophers have in turn been able to recognise in it.9 However, at this point of indifference where there comes to pass the lightning flash of the belonging together of the human and of being, called Ereignisl O by Heidegger, the impossible alliance of receptivity and spontaneity, of activity and passivity, takes place 70

Epilogue or more precisely it gives rise to the plurality of rhythms and times, to the multiplicity of beings and things. But that, doubtless, only a poet could express: At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither move­ ment from nor towards, Neither assent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. 11 In our Western languages, so strongly marked by the stamp of metaphysics and in which the constraints exercised by the grammatical functions give such a great importance to predication and the notion of the subject,12 is it possible to let the silent event of the encounter come to language ? What cannot be said can perhaps be read backwards on the back of a writing that tirelessly celebrates the mourning of presence in the infinite dissemination of signs.13 But it is perhaps also possible directly to make a sign - in the sense of Wink and not of Zeichen 1 4- towards the event in the silences of a restrained speech and through the grace come to pass of a metamorphosis, not of language, but 71

. Telling Time of our relation to language where 'the rigour of think­ ing, carefulness in saying and frugality with words find a wholly other credit than that they have so far received' .15 At this time when everyone is instructed to publish . the most minor drafts, when there are already more supposed authors than genuine readers, and when thinking, forgetting that its nocturnal source lies in the assumption of mortality, associates itself ever more with journalism and succumbs to the illusion of the transcendence of history, it is more important than ever to recall that the thinker, just like the poet, 'is notable according to the quantity of insignificant pages that he does not write'16 and that all speech, in the extreme risk of its utterance, comes about only as a homage to the silence the hearing of which, if possible, is its sole vocation.

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A Note on the Bibliography Tradition dictates that a thesis be accompanied by a bibliography. Nevertheless, I have not judged it neces­ sary to conform to this practice, given the abundance doubtless excessive of notes added to the preceding text. Yet, it has always seemed extremely important, and this applies, in my view, to all attempts at think­ ing, not to fail to cite one's sources. This duty is all the more pressing the less 'powerful' the thought is and the less it claims to 'found' the edifice of an 'original' mode of thinking. This is why the absence in this place of a detailed bibliography signifies less negligence or insolence than it attests, on the contrary, that this brief adverbial text has no other pretension than to 'dwell' in the interstices of a tradition which, for me, it is not a question of 'refuting' or even of 'renewing' but simply of making appear in the light of a question, that of time, in the hope of seeing it open in itself and by itself to other traditions of thinkjng, on this basis. In any case, I have always located the Heideggerian critique of meta­ physics in this perspective, inasmuch as it remains inseparable from the taking up of a 'heritage' truly ours only because, in its living traditional nature, it 'is pre­ ceded by no testament'.1 For, to end on another line of Rene Char's rightly associated on more than one 73

Telling Time occasion

by

Jean

Beaufret

with

Heideggerian

Destruktion: Finally, if you destroy, let it be with nuptial tools.2

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Appendix Chrono-logiesl Can one tell the lightning flash of presence ? Such is the question that had already formed in me at my lycee, while, following the advice of my teacher, Monique Dixsaut, I plunged at the same time into reading Bergson's Thought and Movement and Nietzsche's The Will to Power in Genevieve Bianquis's translation. It seemed to me then that poetry alone could manage, through the extreme condensation of saying which it accomplishes, to express the move­ ment of the real, the 'change without a thing that changes' Bergson speaks of, since, as Nietzsche showed clearly, the 'metaphysical grammar' of philos­ ophy consists in doubling the event of becoming with a second world peopled with substrates and imaginary entities. An encounter with phenomenology, to which I was initiated, variously, by Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida, then teaching at the Sorbonne, revived this question several years later. It was therefore less in the context of a radical critique of ontology, following the Nietzschian model which sees in being only a 'vapour of a word', than in the Husserlian and above all Heideggerian horizon of a phenomenological ontology 75

Telling Time that I was drawn to formulate the same inquiry in the Master's dissertation I devoted in 1966 to 'Language and Ontology in Heidegger', under the direction of Paul Ricoeur. I saw in this phenomenological ontology no longer the science of being identified with what . Heidegger, following Husserl, calls Vorhandenheit, the subsistence or already accomplished pre-sence of a substrate-being, that, as such, can inhabit only the beyond of a second world, but the coming to language of being in the verbal sense which is identical to the very occurrence of time and refers to no other rule than to that of phenomenality. In this way I was led, taking as my guiding thread the Heideggerian attempt to 'reform' the language of metaphysics, to a lasting interest in the status of the discursivity proper to the Western mode of thought as it rests on the predicative proposition and is tied to a determinate conception of philosophical logic. The question of the possibility of a use of language and of a phenomenological logic that would be given over to the 'temporality of being' had then become the princi­ pal axis of my reflection. After entering the university as an assistant, it seemed necessary to give this ques­ tion the academic form of a subject of a these d'etat that I entitled, in a fairly vague manner, 'Heidegger and Language' and that Paul Ricoeur, in spite of the imprecise natur� of the project, agreed to supervise exactly twenty years ago, at a time when his 'Phenomenology and Hermeneutics' seminar in the Avenue Parmentier in Paris was the place where I 76

Chrono-logies really worked. I must admit that I had at the time fallen victim to the illusion that consists in believing oneself to be the owner of a theme and the inventor of a question, and it was in this condition that I busied myself, in the following years, amassing material for what was to have taken the form of a longwinded academic work. I had still not at this point realised the extent of the irony that governs every enterprise of thinking and of the immense naivety that pushes us to imagine our­ selves the masters of our own questions, when it is they that in reality lead us at times even where we do not wish to go. Many years and the conjunction of various circumstances were required before I saw that I could not accomplish the project of a thesis on Heidegger. The analysis, pursued throughout this period, of what is often described, in the context of what Nietzsche would with some right call 'an antique dealer's historicism', as the 'corpus' of an author had led me in a more and more decisive man­ ner to consider Heidegger's work less as constituting an object of study in itself than as an invitation to what he calls a Gespriich, a dialogue with the thinkers. By scrupulously following Heidegger's indications I found myself engaged in reading not only the funda­ mental texts, Greek and German, of Western thought but also the thinkers belonging in a broad sense to the 'phenomenological' movement. From then on, it was out of the question to envisage giving a finished form to an inquiry that promised indeed to be interminable. 77

Telling Time Anyway, the inquiry was its own justification since it was more than enough to secure the enjoyment intrin­ sic to that celebration in which the mere exercise of thinking consists, an activity which has no need of exteriorisation in works. It was in this frame of mind - a frame of mind that I like to think of as eminently philosophical, phil­ osophy being nothing other for me than the practice of teaching with respect to which Heidegger rightly emphasised that it is the teacher who learns the most ­ that I decided to renounce the project of the monu­ mental French these d'etat, all the while being acutely conscious of having in this way failed to fulfil the tacit contract that tied me to the institution. However, this decision did allow me henceforth to accept invitations to give lectures and write articles in which I risked presenting a brief synthesis of the readings I had undertaken and brought out the nodal points of what it is the fashion to call philosophical 'research', although it seemed to me personally to be more like meditation and even, more prosaically, that 'rumina­ tion' spoken of by Nietzsche. Especially as regards the last ten years of my 'work' (another fashionable term), it is clear that, far from forming a disparate miscel­ lany, its parts are so closely interrelated that, although treating different topics and authors, they are exposed to the danger of repetition. It would therefore be wrong to see this sequence of texts as stages of a philo­ sophical itinerary leading to a destination. They should be regarded rather as a kind of running on the 78

Chrono-Iogies spot in a frequently repeated attempt to seize in the overlapping of their various aspects the complex con­ figuration of a question which remains perennially the same. These then are the 'exercises' or 'essays' which I am now going to endeavour to 'defend', since Jacques Taminiaux's generous invitation to be your guest here and to give a resume of my work persuaded me that the time had come for me to settle, in my own way, the debt I bore to the institution called the University. Nowhere seems to me more appropriate for this than Louvain whose name is so closely associated with phenomenology and where the latter has always remained a living form of thought, in particular in the Centre for Phenomenological Studies, presided over by Jacques Taminiaux, whose work I have followed from afar. It must be said again, following Heidegger, that phenomenology constitutes not merely a 'point of view' or a 'trend' in philosophy but the only method appropriate to it, a view perfectly expressed by the Husserlian maxim of the return to things themselves. 'Phenomenology' is for me - this would be my first 'thesis', the one underpinning all the others - the 'true' name of a philosophy concerned less with searching for the truth 'behind' appearances than with opening itself to the donation hie et nunc of being that, far from isolating us under the figure of an absolute without ties, is, on the contrary, in its finitude nothing other than the relation it has to us. This 'phenomenology of finitude', in Jan Patocka's elegant formula, can, m 79

Telling Time contrast with Hegelian phenomenology, be built only by breaking with the idea of an absolute mastery of phenomenality. I saw this at work, par excellence, in Heidegger's thinking, without this ever distancing me from the assiduous reading of Husserl's texts to which I was introduced in a decisive manner j ust as much by the abundant notes accompanying Paul Ricoeur's translation from 1950 of the Ideas, as by the long com­ mentary on The Origin of Geometry published by Jacques Derrida in 1962. Talk of a phenomenological 'movement' and not a 'school' is well founded, and I have always tried to stay in this movement, j oining rather than opposing the names Husserl and Heidegger, by following the example of those who have found themselves 'caught' between the two thinkers and who have worked, admittedly not without difficulty, to maintain the unity of phenomenology: Eugen Fink, Jan Patocka and, in France, Merleau-Ponty. One can, as the last of these clearly showed, unilaterally see in Husserlian phenomenology a philosophy of intentionality which would display the absolute mastery of meaning by the subject but one must also recognise the marks, in par­ ticular under the terms 'operative intentionality' and 'passive genesis', of a discourse of the non-presence of the subject to itself, decisively opening the latter to temporal transcendence. This is why reading Husserl's texts constitutes for me not only the 'school of rigour' it is rightly agreed to be and through which it is a good thing to pass but also a permanent 80

Chrono-logies dwelling place. It seemed to me essential, in the short essays I have devoted to Husserl, not only to empha­ sise the considerable enlargement the notion of intuition undergoes in the sixth Logical Investigation, a crucial point for Heidegger who saw in categorial intuition the point of departure for his own question of being, but also, in a less strictly Heideggerian man­ ner, to place emphasis upon everything that prevents one from considering transcendental phenomenology to be a simple repetition of Cartesianism: on the importance and precocity in Husserl's thought of the problem of intersubjectivity, on the wholly singular nature of his idealism which links him to a 'true' posi­ tivism and above all to his critique of the thing in itself and the Kantian theory of the two modes of intuition, originary and derivative, which lead him, by refusing to accept the idea of an actual infinite, to confer on time, in a strange proximity to Nietzsche, a wholly new ontological importance since the supposed eternity of idealities and logical truths is revealed to be only an omni-temporality, which is to say a mode of temporality. Refusing to play off Heidegger against Husserl in this way, my reflections developed in two complemen­ tary directions at once: the investigation of the Husserlian foundation of a 'pure logic' and the theory of meaning underpinning it inasmuch as it is the corollary of a genetic problem in phenomenology that leads at the level of the Krisis to the idea of a para­ doxical historicity of truth; and the analysis of the 81

Telling Time Heideggerian Destruktion of the theory of language and traditional logic that should be understood less as the rejection of logic and the promotion of irrational­ ity than as a leading back of traditional logic to its temporal foundations, which is to say to a larger sense of AOYO� than that which confines it within the struc­ ture of the predicative proposition. To do this required first of all the clarification of the very framework of Heidegger's thought, and this is what I attempted to set out in a short book published in 1990 on Heidegger et la question du temps. 2 Since 1927 Heidegger's project had in no way been that of inscribing his fundamental question in the already cir­ cumscribed field of philosophy but, on the contrary, of questioning the condition ' of possibility of the latter and of exposing the roots of Western rationality. Philosophy was determined with Plato and Aristotle as the form of thought that claims to account for what is presently given, for beings as such, without appeal­ ing to an origin of another order and, in this way, breaking with the mythological mode of thought. From that moment Heidegger's question concerned the condition of possibility of the understanding of being as constant presence in the Greek philosophers and their heirs. What makes possible the understand­ ing of being on the basis of a specific dimension of time, the present? Such, in its most raw sense, is the question at the origin of Being and Time. Heidegger did not seek to oppose time and becoming to being, nor did he see in the latter the 'meaningless fiction' 82

Chmno-logies that Nietzsche saw. On the contrary, he sought to bring out the secret connection of what we call 'being' with time. What makes the rational discourse of Western logic possible is a certain understanding of being against the horizon of time governing the com­ portment of that being, open to itself and to other beings, which Heidegger calls Dasein and whose intrinsic temporality defines it as being essentially towards death. It is therefore the finite temporality of existence which is the source of the idea of being on which Western rationality is founded. What is thus brought out is that philosophy is never a 'pure' theory and that ontology can never be detached from its concrete existential root. The science of being is consequently a temporal science that can in no way be founded on the a-temporality of reason nor on the eternity of truth, two fundamental presuppositions of traditional logic. From this latter perspective of an inquiry into the meaning of the supremacy of logic in Western thought, I then directed my work, above all in the framework of my teaching, towards German Idealism and, in particular, Hegelian dialectical logic since the latter presents itself as the most powerful attempt to submit being to the imperatives of reason. The identi­ fication in Hegel of logic and ontology nevertheless takes the form of an overcoming of traditional logic · and of its founding principles: the principles of identity and non-contradiction. But this recognition of contradiction as the motor of the dialectical mode of 83

Telling Time thought takes place in the context of the predicative proposition which, far from being brought into question, continues to form the fundamental structure of the speculative proposition in which subject and predicate merely swap positions. The Hegelian dialectic thus manifests the culmination of the thesis of the logi­ cal nature of being in which Nietzsche was to see the very essence of metaphysics. Is there not, however, another mode of thought that, while giving a place to contradiction or rather to conflict, nevertheless does not present itself as the leading back of the Aoyoe; anoq>avnKoe; [apophantic Aoyoe;1, on which the entire edifice of traditional logic rests but constitutes rather a radical questioning of it? It was by posing this question that I was drawn to interest myself in Holderlin's theoretical essays more than in his poetry, following in this also an indication of Heidegger's who saw in Holderlin one who had penetrated and broken the speculative Idealism Hegel had worked to constitute. The short work which I devoted to Holderlin's reflections on tragedy3 and which, like almost the entirety of the writings pre­ sented here, is the text of lectures, is really only a frag­ ment of a much larger project that attempted to bring out the specificity of Holderlin's mode of thought inasmuch as it comes under a 'logic' obeying the prin­ ciple of what one might term its matrix intuition, that of the Bv �haq>Epov EaU'too, of the One differing from itself. This 'poetic logic', in Holderlin's own terms, is the expression of the temporal dynamic and of the 84

Chrono-Iogies original tearing apart, of the Ur-teilung of a totality that presents itself only in specific historical aspects. What appeared to me in reading the Remarks on Sophocles is the coincidence of the anti-rhythmic moment of caesura with that of speech, the concomitance of the suspension of the succession of representations and the appearance of the entirety of time under the figure of the divine, which implies that it is only in separation that the most intense intimacy with the totality [Ie tout] comes to pass and in human speech alone that the 'monstrous' and the sublime inhumanity of the world appears. It was then, by taking from Heidegger himself the expression and the idea of a 'phenomenological chrono-logy', that I tried to outline in broad strokes the whole of the problem that had led me to question above all the texts of the philosophico-poetic trinity I had particularly chosen as my own: Husserl, Heidegger, H6lderlin. For what Heidegger understood in 1926 by chronology is certainly not the historical science of the same name but a discipline whose task is the investigation of the temporality of phenomena. It responds, in the period of the composition of Being and Time, to Heidegger's need at that time for a Destruk!ion of traditional logic and a development of a properly philosophical logic which would manage to reinsert in its own statements the temporal element, effaced in the . process of formalisation, that would give back to unO<j><XV01C; its true sense of the presentation of phenom­ ena. In this sense chrono-logy means therefore the 85

Telling Time logic of temporality in opposition to traditional formal logic. But because the AOYOC; in question here no longer has the formal sense it bears in the philosophical tradi­ tion, such a chronology can in no way be founded in the manner of an a priori science nor be assigned trans�endental conditions of possibility. It can only in some way sketch itself inchoately in actu and exist only in its own attestation. This is the reason why, no methodological treatise being possible in this regard, such a 'logic' of temporal­ ity can be improvised only in a joyous 'precipitation' opening onto no new architectonic, implying that, in a way, it no longer comes under 'philosophy' in a strict sense. It demands the leap into the event of presence and the taking into view of the, in principle, invisible or inapparent coming into presence of the present, while philosophy, in its 'evasive' transcendentalism, tries to reconstruct it the wrong way round, beginning with its result instead of setting itself up in becoming. It is this fundamental anachronism of the philosophical proce­ dure that I have tried to bring to light by emphasising that it derives from the logicism inherent in the Western tradition which, since it has detached the apophantic statement from the existential and hermeneutic event whose result it is, has reified both speech and what is spoken of under the de-temporalising figure of VOl'handenheit, already accomplished presence. In this way, logic can be seen to be entirely derived from the 'ontology of pre-sence' whose existential sense is consti­ tuted by the denial of the finitude of existence. 86

Chrono-logies Finally, I must emphasise that, on all these essential questions, and in particular on that of the privilege given to presence in the Western tradition, the work of Jacques Derrida has been for me, from the begin­ ning, an extraordinary stimulation and that, like many others, I have remained, in large part moreover with­ out his knowledge, constantly in Gesprach with him. However, I have never felt myself tied by what he himself has termed his 'positions', and what has been put forward as his 'thesis' of a logocentrism and phonocentrism characterising the whole of Western thought has always been for me, to borrow the exact words used by Heidegger in connection with Husserlian intentionality, not a 'password' [m ot de passe] but 'the title of a central problem'.4 For my part, I have been more tempted to see in the AOY0